If you are actually wondering what your history classes didn’t cover, “Lies My Teacher Told Me” (which is a bit of a misnomer, it’s actually a criticism of textbooks, not teachers) and Howard Zinn’s “A People’s HIstory of the United States” are places to start. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is fairly short and is more about the general pattern of race and a few other things not being handled well in history textbooks and why that is. It’s making a point, and it uses a small number of concrete examples to do that. Because of what it is, there’s going to be a lot it doesn’t cover. “A People’s History of the United States” is much more comprehensive. There’s undoubtably some things it misses too (history is big, and people have their biases) but there’s also going to be a lot you either didn’t hear about at all or didn’t hear about the way “A People’s History” talks about it. If you want something more specific, like queer history, you should get a book on that topic. I’ve got And The Band Played On, about the AIDS crisis, on my reading list, but don’t necessarily have a huge stack of recommendations. (I’ve read most of Out of the Closet but am not super thrilled by it, for instance it uses male pronouns to talk about We’wah, a Zuni lhamana, even though people at the time used female pronouns.) However, there are places you can ask: on quora, an appropriate subreddit or fb group, ask someone on here who seems to know what they’re talking about, etc. You can also ask a librarian, they tend to be good for that kind of thing (if they don’t know they’ll get back to you.) Or you can contact a university professor of an appropriate department -- even if you don’t go there, they’ll probably be willing to answer a quick email in the name of spreading knowledge. But what if you’re thinking, OK that covers me, but shouldn’t people actually be learning this in, you know, school? You’re right, and groups of people getting together and showing up to school board meetings etc can and do make a big difference in terms of who gets hired to teach, what textbooks are used, and to what degree POC history, queer history, etc gets addressed in schools at all levels. When I was in school: we had a Muslim come into my class and talk about being Muslim and what jihad means and what the headscarves are about, presumably because someone pushed for that. We got a substantial unit on Japanese internment camps during WWII, presumably because someone pushed for that. We had a gay man and a lesbian come into I think a sex ed class and talk about being gay -- someone pushed for that, and if someone had pushed hard enough for a trans person to come in we might have gotten that too. My elementary school had a number of children’s books centering non-white characters, and I know that didn’t happen by accident.
